I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in the recent past YouTube went and got itself a shockingly reasonable policy towards people using copyrighted music in personal videos. It used to automatically mute any offending audio, but now the system detects the songs used and determines if they’re allowed under specific circumstances: mainly that the copyright holders be allowed to show ads on the video, and that the video not be monetized.

This means I have finally uploaded the Balkan Boyz ‘North America 2015’ movie to a proper public location where anyone can view it. I’m still not tired of it :)

Well that’s easy. It’s this show. I honestly don’t know if I have the energy to keep writing these reviews. I will say that despite doing nothing to address the awful characterization, premise, or visuals of the series, “Choose Your Pain” at least has some more interesting stuff happen. Unfortunately, most of that stuff strains believability, like a Starfleet Captain being separated from his ship to attend a war meeting, just so the plot can have him get captured in a shuttle in open space. Or how Lt. Stamets and Burnham are able to, in only a matter of hours, transfer an alien creature’s ability to navigate the ‘spore drive’ to a Human, using illegal genetic modifications. I guess ‘Star Trek’ has a long history of ridiculous technological solutions, and they’ve always bothered me, but so far STD seems more deus ex machina than usual. The real shame about it in this case is that the plot solves the characters’ moral dilemma for them, by removing it all together. Burnham doesn’t have to follow orders and kill the Tardigrade. Saru doesn’t have to live with a tough command decision. Any dramatic teeth the episode may have had are long gone by the end.

What’s the deal with Saru, anyway? He’s spent the entire series up to this point lecturing Burnham on Starfleet principles, and on his first day as Captain he’s ordering her to torture an alien life form to death just to save Lorca, while Burnham is the one who’s not willing to do whatever is necessary? There are simply no good people in this organization. Star Trek used to be hopeful that one day our morals wouldn’t just bend to fit any situation, but on this show, everyone’s as ethically flexible as the plot needs them to be.

Captain Lorca on the Klingon prison ship: boring. How many times have we seen the ‘running fire fight to the shuttle bay’ escape plan before? Good Lord! Draping itself in tired old sci-fi cliches is not going to help ‘Discovery’ leave the old Trek behind. Also, new addition Lt. Tyler is clearly a spy who was allowed to ‘escape’ with Lorca. I’m not sure they could have telegraphed it any more clearly. He’s the same actor who plays Voq, the albino Klingon, who was told in last week’s episode, by a member of the house of ‘deceivers’, that he would have to give up ‘everything’ for victory. They’re not even trying. If true, it means STD is leveraging the Augment Virus plot line from “Enterprise”, walking in the same footsteps the franchise has already made is not my idea of going boldly.

One other thing about that escape sequence: the VFX on those Klingon guns are a disaster. Entire Klingons ‘vaporize’ by disappearing behind giant green fuzz balls. Even in the 1980s, TNG was able to show skin, then bone, as they burned away from the point of impact. Pick up your game, ‘Discovery’!

That’s about it for now. Oh wait… Lt. Stamets is now from the Mirror Universe. In case that wasn’t obvious enough for you. I’m not talking about Harry Mudd. Just… no.

I’m starting to hate most aspects of this show. Last Sunday’s episode revealed that the USS Discovery is propelled by a ‘Spore drive’, a sort of instantaneous jump system fueled by the spores of magic mushrooms. Unfortunately the crew hasn’t yet figured out how to chart a course with this system, so they rely on the alien creature from the previous episode, which is put into a nipple clamped electro-shocking bondage chamber, and ingests the spores until it gets high enough to guide the ship safely to its destination. No, I did not make that up, and yes, it’s ripped off from ‘Dune’.

‘Discovery’ suggests there’s an energy field that surrounds us, and penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together. It sounds like a familiar concept. I can’t quite remember where I’ve heard it before. Once upon a time Star Trek’s fictional science was attached, albeit flimsily in many cases, to our modern understanding of physics, astronomy, and quantum mechanics. Writers on TNG corresponded with people doing actual scientific work at JPL, NASA, and other labs, in order to ground their stories in some degree of plausibility. No longer. STD is just another action adventure show filled with ‘space magic’ and JJ Abrams-style MacGuffins: ‘Red Matter’, ‘Augment Blood’, ‘The Abronath’. It’s the same boring playbook.

Sticking with the ship’s ‘spore drive’, what is going on with the spinning saucer section? That part of the ship has windows, so we assume there are people in it. Do Starfleet ships now have such fine grained control over gravity and acceleration that individual parts of the ship feel no effects from the movement of others? The torque necessary to spin such a huge object so quickly must be insane. Aside from those nitpicks, the concept itself implies that Discovery, and her Sister ship, the Glenn, were built around Spore Drive technology. It’s what they’re designed to do, and yet, the crews have no idea how to get it working properly. So Starfleet designed and built two massive Starships around an experimental technology that they’ve yet to figure out? Come on!

Still worse is the behaviour of the characters. The catty sarcasm and veiled insults are dialed up in this episode, to the point that one officer walks out on their Captain giving them an order, and Michael spends an entire scene giving the silent treatment to someone talking directly to her. Almost every line spoken by a person on this ship is so unprofessional that it would get them pulled into the HR office of any modern workplace. Captain Lorca has to replay the transmissions of Humans dying under Klingon attack just to convince his crew they should help. These are Starfleet officers? Disgusting.

The Klingons continue to be an absolute chore. The actors are clearly struggling to perform in costume and makeup, their body language and facial expressions lacking any sort of the intensity and pride one would expect. It must take all of their effort just to remember their lines, and it shows. There’s a laughable scene full of romantic subtext between two of the main Klingon characters. It was written as if they’re two office workers flirting by the water cooler. Klingons do not flirt. They do not hint at desires. They conquer.

All of this leads to a battle near the end of the episode, where the Discovery ‘jumps’ in to defend a Human colony from Klingon attack. The scene is a confusing mess of directionless animation and rapid fire editing, never letting us figure out exactly where things are or what’s happening. I’m not sure if it was a deliberate choice, to show the chaos of battle, or plain old incompetence. Neither worked for me. The sequence ends with the ship jumping away from the area, a little girl looking up and asking ‘who saved us?’, in a laugh-out-loud moment straight out of a parody of a Michael Bay film. Apparently this crew is content to stop the attack, but leave the remaining civilians defenseless, certainly injured, and possibly dying.

This show has the emotional intelligence of a teenager, and just as much subtlety.

Well, after the first proper episode of this new series, I still don’t like it, though things are getting more interesting. Most of my issues still revolve around tone and characterization, but there’s one other thing that bugged me after seeing the USS Discovery for the first time: that damn ‘Aztec panels’ texture!

Look, the VFX in this series are competently executed, but many of the aesthetic choices are truly awful. The glossy, shiny surfacing paired with over-saturated lighting and high contrast texture maps bring to mind the early days of 3D fan art, not physically real objects. Nothing about the above image convinces me I’m looking at a starship. It’s just a 3D model inside the computer of a person who’s never heard the word ‘subtlety’. Interior sets and props are much the same. Various shades of smooth grey metal or plastic, punctuated by a strip of blown out LED lights. Starfleet expects people to live and work in that environment for months or years at a time? I don’t even want to look at it for a couple of hours, and I’m at home on my couch!

Things don’t feel much better when it comes to the people inhabiting this monstrosity. So far, nearly everyone on Discovery has behaved more like a high-school ‘mean girl’ than an officer in a professional organization. Attitude, sarcasm, selfishness, insults and disrespect ooze out of every character as we meet them for the first time. Not just toward Burnham, who seems content to stick with the silent treatment through most of it, but to each other. Even Michael’s new bunk mate is an annoying, embarrassing stereotype of the ‘nerdy loser’, who literally uses the ‘this seat is taken’ trope as if they’re in grade school. Only Captain Lorca seems remotely interesting, and despite his questionable motives, joins Saru as the only other character who seems to behave as a mature, intelligent adult. Everyone’s lines are written in the very best colloquial English 2017 has to offer. This show is going to seem dated in record time.

The ‘haunted space ship’ rears its head in this episode, because that’s something we haven’t seen before. I did appreciate the mangled crew members, though. Star Trek has always been far too tame when depicting the horrible things that might happen to people in its universe, and I’m glad to see that starting to change. I could have done without the Klingon warrior ‘shushing’ the away team. Not only is he from an alien culture, but the show just spent its entire premiere trying to establish these guys as bad ass, and yet the very next time we see one, he’s the punchline of a joke. Dramatically and emotionally tone deaf. Are we sure JJ Abrams isn’t on the writing team?

So Captain Lorca and the Discovery are working on a way to travel without Warp drive. Too bad this is pre-TOS or, the ‘biology of space’ aside, it might have been a cool idea. Since Warp drive is still in use far into the future of both established timelines, we’re only left to wonder in what interesting and dramatic way they’ll fail. Oh, and probably secret way, too, since Picard and co. are still legitimately astonished by the Iconian gateways.

Prequels. Sigh.

The show is just interesting enough that I’m curious to find out what happens next, but that’s all. I still don’t like most of these characters. I don’t want to hang out with them. I don’t want to be where they are. I haven’t seen a future worth looking forward to, and in my mind, if you don’t have that, you’re not Star Trek.

‘Star Trek Discovery’ had its premiere this past weekend and I finally managed to get a hold of it yesterday. The good news is that I don’t hate the show, but everywhere from editing to characterization, production design to acting, it’s riddled with so many poor choices that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to like it.

Visually, ‘Discovery’ is exactly like the NuTrek JJ Abrams films. Not a good start. Everything on screen seems to run the brightness gamut from totally black shadows to bright shiny highlights. There’s a ridiculous amount of contrast in every frame, to the point that none of the locations or environments seem remotely real. Ship interiors are all polished grey steel, glass screens, and over-saturated coloured lights. It’s cold and uninviting. Exterior shots are similar; the blown out lighting and high specularity of the ships’ hulls make the shots look more CG, not less. Starfleet and Klingon ships seem to be nearly the same colour, and neither is established well enough to make them easy to spot during action scenes. I hate the weapons. Both the hand and ship phasers have adopted the pop-gun style effect from the Abrams films, leaving space battles a confusing mess of machine gun tracer fire. Shields seem to be dealt with entirely through dialogue, another NuTrek staple. The Klingon cloaking device is now a comical green energy ripple. This show displays no visual subtlety.

I never thought I’d long for DS9’s ‘Kiss army’ Klingons. I have no idea how these ones made it out of the art department. I don’t mind the cultural changes, but visually, they’re a mess. It’s obvious that none of them can move around in their ridiculous spiky suits, and the actors appear to be drowning in prosthetic makeup. The main villain can barely open his mouth to speak, and when he does, only manages to sleep walk through his lines. I’m not sure if the actors aren’t up to the task, or if their performances can’t escape from under that makeup, but none of them come close to pulling off the Klingon language. They’re devoid of passion, personality, and weight. It’s as if all of the production’s effort went into the Klingon visuals, instead of into how they would behave. Their bridge is excessively designed, and the ‘Torchbearer’ armour that’s been featured so heavily in marketing is on screen for all of fifteen seconds. Strange priorities. We’re also treated to even more scenes of Starfleet officers besting Klingon warriors in hand-to-hand combat, a decades long pet peeve of mine. The Klingons are one of sci-fi’s iconic aliens, but they should have passed them by this time.

The conflict between main character Michael Burnham and Captain Georgiou seems out of place for officers who’ve supposedly been serving together for seven years. Michelle Yeoh does her best through these first two episodes, but there’s ultimately very little in the script that creates the kind of familiarity and warmth I’d expect from such old friends. As a result, Georgiou’s death falls flat. I also have a hard time believing that a Starfleet officer, even one trained at the Vulcan Science Academy, would resort to mutiny. Starfleet doesn’t fire first. I think, after seven years, Commander Burnham would have at least read a manual on Federation ethics. The whole scenario reeked of forced drama that the story hadn’t earned.

I have many more nitpicks. The tepid musical score. The uninspired intro that could easily be from a procedural cop show. The paint-by-numbers computer screen graphics. The tribunal of judges who’s faces are all in shadow. There were so many unimaginative design choices that scream ‘this is what’s cool in 2017’, and more than anything this show feels desperate to be ‘cool’. So far, there’s no charm. No heart. It’s taking itself so seriously, wanting me to like it to much, that it pushed me away.

None of that matters as much to me as the same issue I’ve had with this show since it was announced: the premise. It’s a prequel, which by definition means it’s stuck in the past. Star Trek should be about the future. Even though this show is clearly a reboot, albeit one that doesn’t have the guts to say so, it’s still treading the same old ground. Klingons, Vulcans, and out of place sound effects from the 1960s show. ‘Discovery’ is built on a foundation of Boomer nostalgia and visual cliches. Nothing about the premiere offered any interesting new ideas. I can only hope they’re still to come.

I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it. ‘Star Trek Discovery’ has a chance, but it’s got some catching up to do.

I walked around the world on these shoes. Well, not literally, of course. I bought them in Nice after it became obvious that my original travel shoes weren’t up to the task, and wore them nearly every following day until it was time to go travelling again two years later. Today I have three pairs of similarly styled foot ware, but nothing I like as much as I liked these. They tackled endless kilometres of city walks, dirt trails, mountain hikes, desert sand, a bit of snow, and more than a few dance floors. I never expected a pair of Sketchers to be that good.

Sometimes my travel year feels like it happened yesterday, and other times it seems like a lifetime ago. I’m always one to reminisce, and if a picture says a thousand words, what about thousands of pictures? Or one poster?

After the first two Balkan Boyz posters, there remained a very large, very obvious missing link in the chain. Our longest tour to date: Southeast Asia. The three months that cemented our bond, gave us a secret handshake, a logo, and tattoos. More than enough to warrant a few hours in Photoshop. Quite a bit more than ‘a few’, actually.

We all hope there are many more posters to come. For now, the Balkan Boyz project is at least caught up, more or less… ;)

Well that’s disappointing. It might seem like I’m deciding to hate this series before seeing it, but what’s really happening is that I’m simply not liking most of what they’ve shown. On the plus side, I think the cast looks great. Beyond that, there just isn’t very much to cheer.

The prequel setting has been covered by many as a terrible idea. It’s just never going to be as interesting as pushing forward into the future; into the unknown. That’s what Star Trek used to be about, before it was hijacked by JJ Abrams and his cult of Boomer nostalgia mongers.

My big problem with what we see in this trailer is the production design. Everything about it looks like JJ Trek. The overly colour graded look of the shots. The high contrast lighting style. The shiny, grey metal surfaces. The lens flares. That does not look like an environment I’d want to visit, let alone live in. Who didn’t wish they could visit the old Enterprise, or have a drink in Ten Forward, or walk along the Promenade and meet friends at Quark’s? Those places were warm, inviting, and optimistic. This series looks soul crushingly bland, and most importantly, it doesn’t look fun. How a show looks tells you all you need to know about it. It’s the body language of a series. Here, even the Klingons, one of science fiction’s all time classic aliens, have been completely redone. Star Trek’s motto from now on: needlessly redesigned.

I read an interesting commentary on this trailer and how it compares to the way the Star Wars franchise treats its history. When ‘The Force Awakens’ or ‘Rogue One’ were made, no one came up with a new look for the Millennium Falcon. No one offered their take on the X-Wing. Sure, the models and assets were beefed up and improved for a modern film, but there’s no confusion that they are the same ships we’ve all grown up with. The people working on contemporary Star Wars love and respect it. So when the time comes to create something new, they work around what’s been done before and make sure it all fits together. Not so with Star Trek. The people working on modern Trek think it’s tacky and dated. They don’t love or respect the original works and therefore are willing to wipe the slate clean and update everything, keeping only the tiniest forms of fan lip-service the marketing department has asked for. They think old Star Trek sucks.

Marketing is what is really driving this new show. It looks this way because the JJ Abrams movies look this way, and CBS has decided to try and leverage them to build their ridiculous online streaming service. Revere Trek’s history? Who cares! Appreciate continuity? Boring! Now Star Trek on TV looks like those movies you saw a few years ago, so come and watch, for just $10 a month!